Smith v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1918
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 15 later decisions — most recently November 1993
3 federal appellate · 12 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on People v. Ward · People v. . Miller · Fears v. State · Commonwealth v. Cooper · Brown v. Shirley Hill Coal Co.
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Of the alternative moral and social evils, which is the greater, to deprive property unlawfully acquired of all protection as such, and thus to discourage unlawful acquisition but encourage larceny, or to punish, and so discourage larceny, though at the possible risk of thus omitting so far forth to discourage unlawful acquisition? The balance of public policy, if we thus attempt to estimate the relative weight of alternative evils, requires, it seems to us, that the larceny should be punished.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Say v. State““It is also well settled that a chattel kept for an unlawful purpose, such as intoxicating liquors kept for sale in violation of law, or gambling paraphernalia, the possession of which is prohibited, may be the subject of larceny.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Clementi
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.